Google double the size of its Index

Excellent point, and one that leads me to suspect that the increased page counts are inaccurate. I have heard no one complain that they fell in rankings as a result of the additional pages. How can the pool size truely double, without any detectable change in SERPs? Pool size is a huge factor.

 

Totally agree, longcall.

 

I think that there are definitely a lot of new pages there; they just aren't being considered strongly when normal searches are made (ie, not searches like site: allinurl: etc). A lot of them are likely to be low PR pages that would only really show up for highly specfic terms anyway. In the competitive phrases, there probably isn't as much new competition from these pages. This is still a good thing for searchers though, as they will be more likely to find some answers for very specific questions. I tried some searches yesterday for very specific items in several search engines and at times like that it is clear why Google is the dominant engine - it simply has more results.

Also, I think there is a lot of ordering left to do; it's one thing to add the pages and another entirely to decide their value. Things like anchor text etc, don't seem to be taken into account yet for some pages that have been in the index for weeks already and therefore they simply aren't competing.

Just my theories.. I'm expecting a big shuffle soon.

 

What's a doubling of the page count going to do to PR on the next update?

Does more pages mean that existing PR values will generally trend lower?

 

It won't make any difference to the True PR values that are used in the rankings (in fact some of these may increase due to more pages linking to them), but it may effect the way that Google displays thier Toolbar PR, which is really of no ranking importance, though I do concede that it does have commercial ramifications.

How I wish people could turn off their fixation on Google toolbar PR.

 

I've noticed many of the new pages indexed are only the URL without the content. It seems like Google lists all URLs it knows from a site now....and this doesn't mean the actual content for the URL has been indexed. When browsing a site Google will find many URLs that it will browse later. For some reason it now lists all those URLs too.

It seems to me that site:URL now only shows how many pages Google know of...and not how many pages Google actually indexed.

Does anyone understand anything of what I'm trying to say?

 

Google broken ..

What's broken about it? Does it not search for websites anymore?

Yes, I'm being cynical and I am sure Google arent' that bothered MSN has launched a supposed new search engine. From where I'm sitting it sucks just the same as it did before.

Let's get back to more interesting SEO concepts regarding Google not that it has extra pages or is broken.

Darren